Omnibus Est Stupri Aliquem--”Everybody was fucking somebody.”

This is dangerous territory. I could be vague and write about the people I want to talk about as if they were hypothetical and their stories anecdotal, but the damage was real and needs to be discussed. I use only Initials when I do not have solid evidence and the men or women are still alive. Believe whatever you want. You get to decide if you will remain in a world of denial and protect whatever you feel needs protecting. Guru types acting badly are precisely that. Even if I’ve made an error and the few I allude to are as clean as the morning dew, there is a long line of those who fill the bill and then some.

Yesterday, I uncovered some slight nostalgia for the New Age California of the last half of the last century, the last of the last. After all, we all learned so much, didn’t we? I’ve talked at length about Bob Hoffman’s sexual and emotional abuse and its lingering effects. I woke up trying to tell myself that perhaps it wasn’t that bad. After all, I knew at least two other young men who were the object of his aggressive, entitled, and uninvited sexual advances. Why should I think I’m special? Besides, I had a life-changing personal breakthrough, so perhaps I ought to change my tune and be grateful.

Then, a rush of other sexual misconduct started like a tidal wave: Everybody was fucking somebody.

It was common knowledge that Claudio Naranjo was fucking KS, but also RS and a few other young women in the groups. He loved the Enneagram, sex, and drugs in no particular order. One woman who lived in his harem had a psychotic break and died in a car crash, but that didn’t stop his behavior. He didn’t even introduce a word of caution. According to this wild, wide-eyed version of the “Work,” there was something to be learned from all our interactions.

Several priests were involved, and they were not celibate--at least for some period of time. They were middle-aged men acting like teenagers. One exclaimed that the vow of chastity was like closing off Soldiers Field. The gay priest came after me, but I wasn’t having it. I’d taken a leave of absence and was having sex, but not with men who’d pledged religious vows.

Joe Scerbo and another friend, an older woman I loved very much but who has cut off communication because of my insistence on talking about things she thinks should be secret, organized a weekend of tantric massage. There was only a hair’s breadth between what transpired and a full-on orgy. It had almost nothing to do with meditation and everything to do with getting naked in a large group with lots of scented oil. A cute guy there from Ichazo’s Arica Training confirmed that those groups, too, were sexually permissive. It was, in his view, part and parcel of being sexually liberated and doing esoteric work.

KS tried to establish an independent “Work” group but lost her license to practice psychotherapy in California when she recommended the services of David (pronounced Da’vid), a Chilean seer who read either your palm or your skull. I forget the particulars, but his blowjobs were legendary. One man who followed KS out of California, I will not use any initials because his crime was so heinous, molested his teenage daughter. Yeah, “everybody was fucking somebody,” but then there are sexual crimes that scream to high heaven.

In these circles, Mr. G. was a mythological figure. You said his name in a hushed voice and bowed your head. We were told he was a trickster whose sexuality was part of his repertoire of teaching tools. Of course, there is only anecdotal information, but that was enough to create a kind of blanket permission for anyone taking up the “trickster” methodology to fuck whomever they wanted, and I say that’s what they wanted, not Liberation. Of course, I, too, only have anecdotal evidence, but I’m not fucking students.

Swami Muktananda, the guru’s guru, had multiple sexual relations with young, underaged women, even girls (I didn’t say dozens because even he probably lost count). No one disputes that, but the other gurus defended him! Naranjo said Muktananda was not a lecher, but he could not break the public perception of the Brahmacharya, so he had to keep his sex life secret. No, Claudio, he was a lecher. Luckily, he preferred caucasian to Indian women and avoided a raft of other cultural taboos. The only question I have is what kind of legal mechanism his successor’s lawyers set up to avoid legal claims bankrupting Yoga Siddi Dam.

One teacher in the broad Hoffman group was credibly accused of sexual misconduct with an employee’s teenage daughter. A teacher from the UK described it as “getting his jollies.” The very Brit description confirms that his conduct was known, not taken seriously, and the subsequent shuffling of responsibilities was seen as shielding the Institute from liability. Why didn’t someone call it out, have him removed, or shut down the operation? One word: power. Money and greed played a role, but the winner was pre-ordained.

I know that HK was fucking at least one woman in our work group. I stood beside him when he invited her to his bed after the meeting ended. Although it was the woman who approached him for sex, he was still her teacher, and, following even loose interpretations of the ethics of student-teacher sexual relations, this was way out of bounds. I could barely believe my ears. HK went so far as to suggest that so and so in the group sleep with so and so but stop sleeping with so and so. He tried to set me up to sleep with one of several women in the group, but at that point, I decided that I’d had enough.

A high-level Scientology auditor didn't even pause before she stuck her tongue down my throat after attending a Dianetics lecture in Palo Alto. When I told her her advances were unwelcome, she told me that being gay could be handled in a few auditing sessions and offered me a cut-rate. The ride back to San Francisco was icy. I’ve never been good at small talk after rejecting a sexual advance. Looking back, “What the fuck did you think you were doing?” might have been appropriate.

Two of the Zen groups I sat with had teachers who slept with students. I told myself that these were adults making decisions about their own lives. I sat meditation with two of the men (they were all men) whose behavior became controversial. In both cases, I learned an enormous amount. In one case, it became challenging. This teacher practiced a kind of serial monogamy, and I wanted to maintain relationships with his former wives or girlfriends.

The case of Richard Baker is more complex. He was not the teacher. Suzuki Roshi was. Baker Roshi and his wife in the 60s could be best described as swingers. I’m sure that Baker and Suzuki Roshi talked about this aspect of his life, and you can also be sure that I have absolutely no idea about the content of those discussions. It was after Suzuki’s death that the accusations mounted, forcing him to resign, but at that point, it all seems to me to be an internal power struggle for control of Zen Center’s assets and not the conversation “Omnibus est stupri aliquem” I’m talking about.

Did we have a part in it? Of course. At 80 years old, what amazes me is that we were so reckless with our emotional lives, and some of our teachers threw any reasonable guidelines in the gutter. Not every case was rape, but hormones ruled the day. In Zen, the Path of Liberation is sometimes called the Path of Intimacy, and sexuality is key. Its fabric is complex and sacred, but in the last half of the half, most of us, students and teachers, treated it with little care and even less self-awareness.

Our greed caused great damage. We didn’t want to leave the Summer of Love behind and feel left out. You didn’t have to be a hippie to flaunt the sexual mores of our parents' generation and many more preceding theirs. We thought that we had opened the secret gate to the mystery of sex! There were soft angelic voices in the air as one SAT member wandered across Cuernavaca searching for her lost diaphragm so that the Aztec god of love might descend. Oh, the fucking arrogance is astounding. Like those priests magically or mystically released from their vows, we’d regressed to pubescent insanity.

Later, out of the wreckage, carefully worded policy statements about sexual conduct have been crafted by a cadre of experts called into service; there are policies and procedures for dealing with accusations of sexual harassment. Sister Mary Ignatius could not have engineered a safer place to do the difficult work of deep introspection, but it is a bloodless hellhole of denial and repression. We constructed in less than a generation what occupied the Catholic Church for millennia.

At least part of the fault here, and I do consider it a fault, is the model of “enlightenment” or awakening or finding the way--it requires submission, but the who, what, and where are left to “one who knows” to use a phrase popular with the followers of Mr. G. And for most people that still means someone wearing a funny hat spouting nonsense and then inviting you to his bed.

Is there another way? I certainly hope so, but it will take time, care, and respect to emerge. Until then, to paraphrase another biblical maxim, “By their sins, you shall know them.”

Sex in the bushes: the real story

In the wall-to-wall news coverage of despicable, unbelievable denials of sexual misconduct by people in high places—today Matt Gaetz, yesterday Donald Trump—I began to wonder about the prevalence of explicit sex innuendo, the circumlocution, the double talk and outright lying about sex that we’re expected to countenance. People say that the times have changed, that we can be more open about our sex lives now in a way that we couldn’t be even a few decades ago—that this openness causes the problems as well as giving us a degree of freedom that our parents didn’t have. The real problem, however, has always been the lies about sex.

Yesterday I had the honor of hosting the distinguished Tibetan Rinpoche, Khyongla Rato, along with Nicky Vreeland Rinpoche and his attendant Lama Norbu for a small lunch in my McLeod Ganj flat. My friend Alex asked if I was going to leave up some of my own art, visual puns, combining Greek pottery figures with French primitive art from the late 19th century. It’s not erotic art, so there was no question of offending a celibate monastic.

the non-offending art

On the other hand for anyone with even the slightest understanding of same sex realtionships, it would tip them off that I am gay. Of course they stayed up. I do not hide who I am, and certainly feel no need to be duplicitous, even when dealing with high lamas. I know I can trust them to accept me as I am. I am not going to complicate the relationship by lying or pretending.

For too long, actually, pretending has been at the root of the lying and duplicity that never seems to let up in the tabloid news. I've written about my relationship with Bob Hoffman, and my coming out in #GayMeToo. There was sexual abuse as well as bullying and coercion. But there was also lying and pretense. Hoffman argued that he couldn’t be honest and open about his sexuality because of the negative repercussions on his “important work.”

But the reality was that Hoffman couldn’t be honest with himself. And he tried to force me into that endless denial by accepting his self-justification. And for a while I did, but thankfully his pretense was so shoddy and full of holes that eventually I got fed up.

After Hoffman took 50 or so people through his Process of Psychic Therapy in UC Berkeley’s Tolman Hall, and turned the Process over to Dr. Ernie Pecci, he retired to Puerto Villarta in Mexico, and as I later learned to also deal with his first bout of cancer. At the time he was in a relationship with a man named Harold whom I met on several occasions. Hoffman eventually returned. I can’t remember if it was just to check in or if it was when he decided to curtail Pecci’s psycho-spiritual version of the Process, but I do remember that he and Harold were no longer a couple. I asked him what had happened. Well, he said, he’d discovered that Harold was being unfaithful. Oh really? Here’s the Poor Bob story.

The path into the bushes in Aquatic Park





It seems one day Hoffman needed to get out for some fresh air. He was in a back-to-nature kind of mood. He just happened to drive down to Aquatic Park in Berkeley, a notorious gay cruising place for furtive sex. He wanted me to understand that his excursion was of course entirely non-sexual, just to enjoy the scenery, but, while leisurely strolling along the lagoon looking for blue heron, who should he discover lurking, having sex in the bushes? Harold! Hoffman could now be the offended partner. They had it out, and Harold, in the face of Hoffman’s "righteous indignation," rushed back home to Piedmont and packed his bags. I was expected to believe this story. Of course I didn’t, but neither did I confront Hoffman and challenge him. I couldn’t. Still in transference, I had to allow him the saving grace of pretending to be a virtuous man instead of dealing honestly with his promiscuity and anonymous sex adventures.

Lies build on lies. Justifications pile up sky high. At some point there’s no escape. I didn't take down my innocent humorous washroom art to sanitize my life for the Rinpoche. I learned the hard way: if I lied, there would be no end, or as the Zen saying goes, it’s turtles all the way down.

Here is a link to the page with other writing about Hoffman.

© Kenneth Ireland, 2021